Field dressing is the process of removing the internal organs and skin of hunted game. Proper field dressing is an essential first step in preventing the growth of disease-causing bacteria and preserving the meat from animals harvested in the wild. Field dressing must be done as soon as possible in order to ensure rapid body heat loss and to prevent bacterial growth from the internal organs and body fluids from spreading through the carcass, thus ensuring than the meat stays fit for human consumption and improving the overall quality of the meat.
Field dressing is generally carried out with conventional single blade hunting or skinning knives. A conventional knife may be used to make an incision by the point of the knife blade through the skin and the abdominal wall of the carcass, and then the skin of the animal may be cut away by the blade. Great care must be taken so as not to puncture the intestines or the stomach of the animal with the point of the knife since this would spoil the meat and the hide of the animal. One technique commonly used by hunters is to grasp a conventional knife with the blade facing upwards to avoid cutting the intestines and the entrails. Another commonly used technique is to insert two fingers (one on each side of the knife blade) into the incision, pushing the intestines and the entrails down and away from the knife.
Conventional knives are generally not well suited for field dressing operations because the tip of a conventional knife blade is pointed. With a pointed-end blade configuration, the occurrence of undesirable cutting or perforation of meat or internal organs is highly probable, since it is very difficult to tightly control the depth of the penetration of a conventional knife blade so as to avoid such cutting or perforation. If the hunter is an experienced field dresser, he or she may make only a few small nicks in the carcass. If he or she is a novice, attempting to field dress an animal with a conventional knife may result in significant damage to the meat and a potential loss of the entire carcass.
Other tools available to hunters for field dressing include single blade knives with a gut hook built in into the back of the blade, such as, for example, a disposable skinning knife “Gerber E-Z Zip Gut Hook Blade” from Gerber. However, these knives are usually too small to field dress large game and are very difficult to sharpen. The “Gerber E-Z Zip Gut Hook Blade” knife has a small handle which is awkward to use and is easily breakable.
It would therefore be a significant advance in the art to provide a multifunctional, safe, strong and easy to use field dressing knife by which small and large game may be field dressed, and which is designed to overcome the aforementioned perforation and cutting difficulties associated with the conventional skinning or hunting knives.